At the End of Her Rope

Destroyer a film by Karyn Kusama.  With Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbel, Tatiana Maslany, Sebastian Stan.  *****

This was the best movie of 2018.

I realize that’s an offbeat opinion, but I’ve seen six of the eight Oscar nominees and none was as riveting as Destroyer.[1]  As for performances, Nicole Kidman’s is the best by a man or woman in any movie this year.  I’ve recently seen her in The Upside, Big Little Lies, and this movie, and I’m astonished at the variety and high quality of her performances.  She’s emerging as the best actress of her generation.

She takes a huge chance in Destroyer.  She plays Erin Bell, an alcoholic LA cop who is haunted by a previous undercover operation that went awry.  She is also—as we learn from just a few lines of dialogue—the survivor of a difficult childhood.  And though I’m not sure how old she’s supposed to be—mid-forties?—she looks awful, as if she hasn’t slept in days.  She wears no makeup, her clothes are grubby, at times she can barely walk.[2]  The idea that this skinny old hag is a destroyer is almost laughable; if this movie starred a man it would be Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenager (or maybe, these days, Liam Neeson). But a destroyer she is, and an absolutely believable one.  She’s unstoppable—as she states at one point—because she doesn’t care what happens to her.

The movie uses a jumbled time sequence to great effect (the script in its own way is as brilliant as the performance), so we’re never sure when things are happening, but we do know some of Erin’s current problems.  Her colleagues don’t respect her and dread her arrival on a crime scene.  Her beautiful teenage daughter is seeing a much older guy—we’re talking statutory rape territory—and hanging out at all kinds of places where she doesn’t belong.  We see the attraction—on both sides—but definitely understand why her mother is concerned.  Erin’s ex-husband, with whom the daughter is living, has the same concerns but seems ineffectual (though there’s no great solution to this problem).  He wants to move on in his life.  And as the movie opens we find out that the undercover case Erin was a part of sixteen years before, which apparently ruined her life, has somehow reappeared.  As she says to more than one person, “Silas is back.”

Kidman also plays her younger self, sixteen years before, and in those scenes she seems to be a beautiful waif, tough and edgy.  Actually, she is an undercover cop, partner of a man named Chris (Sebastian Stan).  The operation they move into is sketchy and extremely creepy: the aforementioned Silas (Toby Kebbel) has a kind of psychological grip on a group of people who surround him; at one point he makes one of his henchmen play Russian Roulette with a gun that has three bullets in it.  He’s handsome and menacing and full of himself.  One of his girlfriends, named Petra (Tatiana Maslany), has a wealthy father and stumbles across a job she thinks will be worth millions, a really big heist.  Busting the gang for that operation was what Erin and Chris’ undercover job was all about.  But through a bad judgment call on her part—something she didn’t have to do, and shouldn’t have done—everything goes south.

Erin in the present moment—whatever her past faults and failings—is trying to settle scores and set things right.  She wants to take care of Silas—in particular because he was a murderer, though he is criminal in many ways—and she wants to get her daughter out of a dangerous situation.  Very doggedly, she works toward those two goals.  She’s far from invincible—there are scenes where people beat and stomp her slender frame to the point where we don’t see how she gets up—but she has those tasks and won’t let them go.  She’ll succeed or die trying.

There are two surprises toward the end of the movie that turn things around 180 degrees.  It’s a bit of a tight rope act to write about the movie without revealing them.  One makes Erin seem less self-righteous and more human (helping us understand why she is so obsessed with her daughter’s situation).  The other changes, right at the end, the way we see the whole movie.  That surprise, I thought, was brilliant.

I’m not a fan of violence and revenge movies in general, except for their campy aspect.  I watch Clint Eastwood movies just to see him overplay the role.[3]  But this movie, despite its stock situation, is a work of art, with marvelous script, and direction,[4] and superb performances.  One performance is beyond superb.  It’s unforgettable.

[1] The two I’ve missed so far are The Favourite and Bohemian Rhapsody.

[2] On the IMDb website we discover the interesting fact that she caught the flu during the production but decided to just continue on.  During the final scene with her daughter—a good candidate for the most powerful scene in the movie—she could hardly stand.

[3] My all time favorite Clint moment is the truly dumb Christ symbolism at the end of Gran Torino.  Yes, Clint!  Go for it!

[4] There is a marvelous article in the Times about director Karyn Kusama.  One member of her screenwriting team is now her husband.